Every week eleven tonnes of donated second-hand clothes are received, sorted and repurposed at a small social enterprise called the Textilhafen, in Prenzlauerberg, a neighbourhood in Berlin, Germany. These items – including T-shirts, trousers, shoes, backpacks and bedding – are received from 21 collection bins located on church grounds around the city as well as private drop-offs and corporate donations. At the Textilhafen, which is German for ‘textile harbour’, garments are sorted by hand into different categories of re-use for the next phase of their life cycle.
While the organisation helps to reduce the amount of textile waste produced in Berlin, its main value is how it successfully positions second-hand textiles as feedstock for a network of community care projects that strengthen the social and cultural fabric of the city.
A typical collection bin in Berlin. Photo: Freda Burden
Founded in 2021, the Textilhafen supports the work of the Berlin City Mission (called the Berliner Stadtmission in German) by providing free clothing to people living on Berlin’s streets.
“The Berliner Stadtmission has multiple projects that help people who are in need and one big aspect of their work is taking care of homeless and un-housed people, many of whom need clothes. Living on the streets, they have no opportunity to wash their clothes so they need a regular supply of clean, decent clothes. With this mission in mind, we are the company that sorts textiles that are donated for this cause,” says Beatrix Landsbek, the Textilhafen’s operations manager.
The Textilhafen is part of Komm&Sieh gGmbh, the inclusion company of Berlin City Mission (Berliner Stadtmission), 40% of whose employees have disabilities or difficult backgrounds.
“It might be that they were drug addicts for a long time, they are dry alcoholics, they have experiences of mobbing, suffer from depression, or that they previously worked very hard in construction or something similar,” says Beatrix.
While not all the donations received by the Textilhafen are suitable for everyone living on the streets, it is the team’s primary objective to supply free clothes to 600 people who visit the Berlin City Mission’s Kleidekammers weekly. Unhoused people can request and receive decent quality clean clothes at these changing rooms which are dotted across the city.
The Kleidekammers are strategically located in parts of the city that are considered hot spots for social challenges, and some of them operate in conjunction with other facilities like hygiene centres where guests are able to take showers. Sorters at the Textilhafen work through the donations picking out items for this purpose like comfortable shoes, jeans, tracks pants, hoodies, T-shirts, underwear, socks, winter jackets, backpacks, sleeping bags, insulated sleeping mats and so on.
A Kleidekammer employee shows one of their guests a selection of red shirts. Photo: The Textilhafan
Items that do not suit the needs of the changing room customers but which are still wearable and have resale value are sent to the Berlin City Mission’s neighbourhood charity shops, Kiezladen. This helps with the Textilhafen’s second objective which is to sell textile goods at affordable prices to people living in the city who do not have large incomes.
Entrance to one of the Berlin City Mission’s Kiezladen, neighbourhood second-hand shops. Photo: Freda Burden
The Textilhafen’s third objective is to source materials for the Materiaalpool (or material pool) which supports creatives who, for example, want to produce sustainable clothing or stage designs in a less wasteful way while supporting a socially-inclusive, local business. Artists and textile lovers can shop clothing made from high quality fabrics – mostly items made of natural fibres such as linen, leather and wool – at affordable prices from the Materiaalpool which is located in the Textilhafen’s sorting room.
The pieces sold at the Materiaalpool are not suitable for use at the Kleidekammers or Kiezladens. They might be formalwear items that are not explicitly useful to the guests at the Kleidekammers or they may have signs of damage or wear which make them unsuitable for resale in the Kiezladen charity shops. But, being made of high-grade fibres, the Materiaalpool items hold the potential to remain in use for a long time once upcycled.
Containers in the Materiaalpool filled with high quality fleece, corduroy and loungewear, on sale for about R80 per kilogram. Photo: Freda Burden
Textilhafen’s approach to facilitating the circular flow of textiles in Berlin is considered. Beatrix says: “It doesn’t make sense to invest energy into upcycling fast fashion items that wear out after a few washes. It would be more effective for these items to undergo a chemical recycling process”.
“If you upcycle a fast fashion item that is already worn out after a few washes it doesn’t make sense to add like an upcycling energy into it in terms of making a new garment or deconstructing it. It would be more useful to have a chemical recycling process for it.”
Clients with special requests, such as 100 kilograms of damaged blue denim for a project, can place a sorting order for this material with the Texilhafen.
Containers of sorted items, and the Materialpool in the background. Photo: Supplied
An upcycled product brand, WaterToWine, has an atelier adjacent to the Materiaalpool and produces items like boxer shorts, made from old T-shirts. These are sold to both paying customers and donated to the Kleidekammer’s guests who are often in need of clean underwear. Undergarments are in short supply from second-hand donation stream.
Despite all their efforts, in 2023, more than two thirds of the 604 tonnes of donated clothes collected did not fit any of the Textilhafen recycling streams. About 7% of the items received were in such poor condition (broken, stinky or soiled) that they were sorted into rubbish bags to be incinerated, and 61% of the donations they received were sold to a Polish recycling company which sells these items onto other second-hand retailers in Poland.
These statistics indicate that despite the Textilhafen’s efforts to metabolise the city’s used textiles, they do not have the capacity to digest all of the clothes that they receive.
“We could use more of the donations we receive but we lack capacity”, Beatrix says. “We would like a bigger building with a bigger workshop, a bigger Materiaalpool, another second-hand shop and even a café. The Berlin City Mission is a Christian organisation: we have values we want to bring into the world including taking care of everyone no matter who they are and what their circumstances.”
The Observatory of Economic Complexity reported that in 2023 Germany was the world’s third biggest exporter of second-hand clothes, after China and the United States. Germany exported over 430 thousand tonnes of old clothing and textiles.
The Textilhafen, while not miraculously able to repurpose all of Berlin’s donated textiles, has succeeded in using second-hand clothing donations as the lifeblood of an ecosystem of care. It nourishes the soul of its city by providing employment to people with disabilities and difficult backgrounds, offering a greater sense of dignity to those living on the streets, and making affordable textiles accessible to low-income earners and sustainability-oriented creatives.
In so doing, this social enterprise provides a community-care centred model of how urban organisations can support vulnerable residents and creatives by employing people to sort through and redistribute second-hand textiles.
- Feature image: The Textilehafen in Berlin sorts second-hand clothing that is redistributed through various channels. Photo: Freda Burden
